


Here Lies Scylla

by notsodarling



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Remix, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 07:08:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22492045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notsodarling/pseuds/notsodarling
Summary: Isobel reveals one more secret to Michael.
Relationships: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Comments: 22
Kudos: 109
Collections: RNM Fanfic Remix 2020





	Here Lies Scylla

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Bea, getting another opportunity to write for you was a joy, and the chance to play around in your sandbox was even better! You have so many great works, but there was something about this one that was just begging to be written. I hope you enjoy the dive into Michael's angsty headspace!
> 
> Thank you to Hal for making sure this all made sense, and to Christi for the music motivation.
> 
> \-----
> 
> This is a fic that was a remix of beamirang's "here lies charybdis" which has since been deleted.

He’s not as drunk as he seems, a tolerance he’s built up. But Michael’s gotten good at acting like the alcohol affects him, when really it’s just a good way to dull the pain, try and fill that emptiness inside him. He’d believed for a moment, that maybe Max and Isobel had it right all along, playing human instead of trying to embrace who they really are. Oh, how spectacularly it had backfired the moment he’d felt Max through the bond created when he’d been healed..

Now Max is in stasis, while he and Liz (and Valenti, Michael supposes) try and find a way to bring him back. Liz’s anger at Max often rivals his own, and together they make quite the pair. But tonight, it’s just another evening of him and Isobel sitting around the fire pit. Isobel doesn’t drink. At least, she doesn’t drink like he does - she sticks to one beer and the occasional sip of acetone from a bottle at her feet. Michael’s on beer number four, and he has no intention of stopping.

His head is tipped back, eyes on the stars above, when Isobel speaks up finally. It’s probably why he almost misses what she says.

“I thought he was a bad influence.”

There’s no mistaking who she’s referring to. The only  _ he _ in Michael’s life that he’s ever spoken of to Isobel is both the one person Michael loves more than anything, and also the one tied up in some of his most painful memories.

“Wha-?:

Okay, maybe he’s had more than four beers, because he can feel the words not come out quite like they’re meant to.

“After-” she pauses, and Michael glances over quickly. “After Rosa. When I thought you’d…”

Her voice trails off, and Michael’s mind helpfully supplies the rest. He hadn’t cared about letting Isobel believe he was a murderer for ten years. Protecting her, making sure she continued to have the picture perfect life she was destined for was all he cared about. He was never going to get that, hell, he’d never even had a family or a home. People like him didn’t get that.

When he doesn’t say anything, she continues. As if his silence is inviting her to further explain whatever it is she needs to confess on this particular night.

“I thought he was the reason you were acting so weird. Your hand, and then the girls…”

Michael had always wondered if Max and Isobel had their own secret from him, the way he and Max had kept the truth about the murders from Isobel, or how he and Isobel had made the decision to send Liz away to protect Max. 

But this is almost too much. Michael reaches down and grabs the bottle of acetone at his feet, guzzling it down. 

_ If you were the reason Alex went to war, I’d hate you _ .

He’d thought, that day months ago, when they’d first finally discussed what happened that fateful June night openly for the first time in ten years, that he and Max were finally getting somewhere. He hadn’t realized before then, just how important Liz Ortecho was to Max.

Clearly, Max hadn’t realized how important Alex was to him either.

“Izzy?” He hears his own voice crack at her name, it hurts coming out, because he knows,  _ he knows _ , what she’s going to say. He shifts in his lawn chair, head lolling to the side to look over at her, waiting for the dam to break.

He needs to hear her say it.

“I was trying to protect you.” Her voice is so small, but there’s a certain resolve in her voice, like she’s already said the words out loud to someone else, and now she’s just confessing them to Michael, removing the remaining weight from her shoulders. “I thought if he went, like Liz, it would be easier for you. I didn’t know he was your person. I’m sorry, Michael. I’m  _ so sorry _ .”

He wishes Max were here, confessing this instead of Isobel. It’s easier to be angry at Max after ten years of their strained relationship. But Isobel-

“You’re the reason Alex went to war.” He says the words out loud, needing to feel them on his tongue, needing to hear the truth spoken into the universe. He feels rubbed raw by it, that the two people he cared about more than anything had almost made him lose the only person, the only  _ human _ , he’s ever loved. 

The only thing that ever felt close to what  _ home _ on this planet could be.

“He loves you,” Isobel quickly fills in, reaching out to him and taking his hand in her own. As if he doesn’t know. But loving Michael has never been enough for Alex Manes. He’s always left, he’s always made sure to give himself an out when it got even a little tough, when things weren’t perfect. And Michael, he can’t help but still love Alex with every part of his being. It’s something he doesn’t understand, isn’t sure he’ll ever understand it, and that’s why it hurts the way it does. To know that you are so intrinsically tied to someone who doesn’t want to be with you.

But it’s just more pain and rejection in his life. Nothing Michael hasn’t already handled and survived.

“Even back then. He’s always loved you. I know things are bad between you now, but if you tell him, tell him it was me, then you’re-”

No.

Michael rips his hand out of her grasp, suddenly feeling stone cold sober at the mere thought of Alex finding out why he joined the Air Force, why he spent ten years being part of something he hated, never getting to do what he wanted in life, losing a fucking limb because of it. “We’re not telling him a fucking thing.”

“Why not?”

“Because then he’ll know his old man was right about us all along.”

Alex Manes’ father is part of a government conspiracy to hunt them, to capture them, to experiment on them, to keep them locked up. A hatred fueled by a belief that the aliens that crash landed in 1947 are evil, are murderers, apparently hellbent on destroying humanity. Michael has told Isobel just as much, but he still doesn’t understand why Alex keeps fighting to help. What he gets out of it. 

Alex is the best of humanity. He thinks of being seventeen and living out of his truck, and Alex offering up that shed, somewhere warm and away from the chill of the night air.  _ Humanity _ has always been Alex’s smile that night he’d given him the guitar, his disbelief when Michael had explained to him how gifts are never not attached to strings. It had been that kindness that had made Michael believe, for a moment, that maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe he hadn’t had a family, a home, a place on this planet, because he hadn’t found Alex yet.

He glances down at his hand, the black bandana wrapped tight around it, covering the fingers he can’t bear to look at. The scars and broken bones are gone, and Michael has spent more than one night at the cave, yelling at Max’s pod. He hates Max for thinking it was just that simple to move forward.

He still can’t wrap his head around why Alex had refused to just let him be as the alarms sounded at Caulfield, just let him die with his people, with his  _ mother _ . No one would have missed him if he’d gone up in flames with the rest of the survivors. Max and Isobel may have missed him for a little while, but they had lives, they had families, they had people who loved them - they wouldn’t miss him. And Alex - Alex had walked away. Alex had decided that he didn’t want Michael, didn’t want to be with him. What gave him the right to put his own life as the bargaining chip in those moments? To make Michael choose between the one person he’d spent his life looking for, and the one person who had made this planet worth it?

Alex had called Michael his family, but Michael still doesn’t believe the words. How can he when even if Alex always came back, it always meant he was going to leave again. Alex couldn’t die in that explosion, and that was the choice Michael made. And now he gets to live with the consequences of that decision, the residual memory of the pain he’d felt through the psychic bond there lingers inside him still, and he holds onto it as a reminder.

Michael knows that even good people have breaking points, and this is just enough to perhaps be Alex’s if he’s told the truth. And Michael isn’t sure he can handle finding that out.

“We’re not monsters, Michael.” Her voice is quiet, disbelieving.

Michael shakes his head, because she’s wrong. Max can take people’s lives and Isobel can influence people’s thoughts, and Noah turned into a serial killer leaving a trail of bodies up 285 from Roswell to Cowboy Ruckus. Michael had spent his entire life desperately wanting to learn more, had been the first of them to learn to control his abilities because it was the only way he knew how to protect Max and Isobel, to make sure they were never found out.

In the end, had it even mattered? Every beating, every burn, every rejection, every night of loneliness sitting out in the desert wishing someone would come and take him away - he’d deserved them.

“Yeah, we are."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! <3


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